hi!

I’m going to take out a craigslist ad, I tell him, for a show watching buddy. No touching! That part in bold and large font! Just so we’re clear. I’m so lucky, in that I’m married to someone I like -a lot- and we generally like a lot of the same things. We’ve been together a long time (sixteen years married this summer!) and it’s no small thing that we still have similar sensibilities. But no matter the things in common, we have this glaring difference: that old man of mine does best when he gets to bed at a reasonable hour and wakes up early. He is best in the morning. He just is. And I am an unabashed night owl. So for us to have hang-out time together, one of us has to give. I admit that he attempts late nights way more frequently than I try to wake up early. Attempt and try. It’s awfully hard for us to be, without kids needing our attention, just the two of us together. It takes us a loong time to slog through grown up tv shows together. As far as he’s concerned, we could watch stuff separately and report back. But I like to talk about the thing I’m watching while I’m watching it. I like to talk about the thing I watched after I watched it. Which is why my evening comes to an anticlimactic demise when, by the time the thirteen year old finally heads to bed, I realize that the husband has fallen asleep on the couch.

Does Bob’s Burgers make you LOL like it does me? I can’t recall ever laughing like that when watching tv all alone. The other night, it was just me and a big mug of sleepytime tea and everyone else was asleep and I took a sip and choked myself from laughing and woke my husband up (I was watching in my bed, on my phone, you know) and my choking, unstoppable laughter was so confusing, he started laughing, stirring babe between us, and I thought, right then, that it didn’t matter that he didn’t have a clue what I was laughing about. He could have been annoyed that I woke him up. He could have thought I was ridiculous for drinking tea in the dark and watching an animated comedy on a tiny screen, but he just laughed. It was funny. I don’t even know why I’m writing about this! Because somebody slept in too late today and somebody else was up at sunrise and so somebody still has hours to go and somebody else has long crashed and so somebody needs to remember that that’s ok. We don’t have to share all the things. We share the stuff that matters.

Ulysses is pushing up on his knees now. And I swear, but don’t quote me on this, that he said “hi!” yesterday.

the car situation is back from red alert to orange! cross fingers we can get to all the places we have to be from here on out!

my girl rode her scooter the other day a couple of miles to an activity, making that her longest solo trip yet (most of our town amenities are just blocks away). having a capable big kid is pretty awesome.

mister six is single handedly protecting our front yard garden from being the neighborhood litter box. among other serious self-appointed jobs. that boy of mine, he is a worker.

I am picking plenty of spinach every day. this had been our best spinach year yet! (I really need to blog about our yard + garden.)

I can’t believe it’s summer. Cue annual freaking out about Fall. I’m not sure what next year is going to look like yet.

My husband and I love Tina the best. She’s badass. We also have a similar problem; the husband gets up at four am to work so that he can be home with the kids all day, and he can barely stay awake past nine. We can fit in one half hour comedy most nights before he’s snoring and then I stay up late reading on my Kindle. Sigh.

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"And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt and fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials. But better than joy was calm. Imperturbability could be depended upon. And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone." - John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.